We shop like there’s no tomorrow! We buy and sell and we sell and buy. But what impact are new technologies and shifting cultural attitudes having on our approach to buying and selling in the 21st century? We also explore the practice of murky marketing and the latest international research on mobile devices and shopping behaviour—and the way they can act to keep us in a constant buying frenzy.

Transcript

Antony Funnell: Here's something I'm sure you don't need me to tell you; we shop like there's no tomorrow. We buy and sell and we sell and buy. We live in a consumerist world.

Today on Future Tense a series of perspectives on the nature of selling and buying in the 21st century. Hello, Antony Funnell here. We're not going to attempt to cover everything, but we're going to give it a good go anyway.

Let's start with Philip Delves-Broughton who writes regularly for the Wall Street Journal and The Spectator. He's the author of the book The Art of the Sale.

Philip Delves-Broughton: Technology has changed a lot of the ways we interact. So many of our transactions now are conducted through a computer screen, through a keyboard, and in many ways it's given us the illusion that we've got rid of the old-fashioned sale in which you had to look your washing machine salesman in the eye, your shoe salesman in the eye, because there is so much you can buy online now. In many commercial business-to-business settings, again, you can prospect through LinkedIn or Facebook, you can organise your presentation through Salesforce, there is so much transparency around pricing that dealing with the old-fashioned salesman seems to be a thing of the past, something from the Willy Loman Death of a Salesman era.

But on the other hand, commercialism has become so much part of our lives. If you look at the most hypermodern companies like Apple is perhaps the best example. You know, here was a technology company which decided about 10 years ago that at a time when no computers were being sold by salespeople but were literally being sold in big-box warehouses or online like Dell, to set up retail stores and to fill them with very engaged, very excited salespeople who were passionate about their products. And much of the success of Apple can be pinned down to this decision to go with a very old-fashioned retail sales strategy that served it incredibly well. So these two conflicting forces you see all the time.

Antony Funnell: I've heard it said that modern sales technique is about almost doing everything but making a traditional sale, trying to pretend that you're not selling when you are actually selling. Is that correct from your experience?

Philip Delves-Broughton: I think it has always been like that. When you travel around the world...so what triggered my interest was sales is both the most ancient and the most modern aspect of business. Wherever you go in the world, if you go to Cairo or Athens, you'll find the centre of these cities is a marketplace, it's a square where people used to come and exchange goods, and yet it is also, as you said, it is both highly modern, there's a lot of technology infused in it.

Sales is very much...if you're not in business, it is the first thing you see in business, is the salesperson, it's the first thing the customer sees. So yes, a lot has changed in sales, a lot of technology is now applied. But the thing is that everyone has the same advantage. So if you take something like, say, LinkedIn, which has hugely improved the way in which one can prospect, find the right person to talk to, but it's available to everybody. The same with pricing. So, cars are a good example of this. It used to be the case that people hated buying used cars because you never really knew what you were getting, you didn't know what the price should be and car salesmen had a terrible reputation.

Today you can go online you can see how old your car is, how many miles it has, you can get real pricing transparency. So yes, that has changed a lot of the mistrust and suspicion around selling. But as I said, this is now available to everybody, these are commodities. So the advantage still goes to people who are able to build relationships, who are able to build that extra layer of trust that can make a sale. So yes, technology has changed things, but it has changed things for everybody. So still there is an advantage for old-fashioned sales techniques and the ability to build trust and persuade.

Antony Funnell: I know you've pointed out that selling, that commerce was often looked down upon in previous generations, but today with social media we are all salespeople, to an extent, aren't we. I mean, we're all out there selling our image, we're out there selling our reputation, managing it on things like Facebook, on Twitter.

Philip Delves-Broughton: Yes, and I think that makes a lot of people very uncomfortable, certainly it makes me very uncomfortable. The next phase of this is that...you know, you look at Facebook's IPO, and the valuation of Facebook is basically based on the idea that it can turn its 700 million, 800 million users, however many it has, into walking billboards to each other. So the value of the company is in me telling you, a friend of mine, say, to say something like, 'I just bought a Volkswagen and I love it,' and they commercialise that and they collect the money. So it's turning each of us into salespeople, turning all our social relationships into essentially these commercial relationships.

I think that's very unsettling. I think when you ask yourself, you know, can these companies succeed with that business model, it's going to boil down to this issue; how many people are going to be comfortable with that and how many people are not? And I think if you want a serious discussion about where Facebook is going to be in 10 years, it will be all about can they answer that question.

Antony Funnell: Many of those people who deride the extent to which our world has become commercial, has become about selling and buying, one of the things that they worry about is the effect that it will have on our overall culture. Should we be concerned about that, do you think?

Philip Delves-Broughton: Yes and no. One of the first trips I made when I was writing this book on selling was to Morocco, to go and look at a souk, and partly the reason was because I asked a lot of people who are the most aggressive salespeople you know, and people would say they are basically Middle Eastern rug salesmen. So off I went, and you go to the souk in Tangier, which is where I went, a very ancient institution where people's lives are built around buying and selling. They are embedded in ordinary daily life; you go to work, you buy, you sell, families talk about commerce morning, noon and night.

I often wonder if this idea that commerce and the rest of life should be separated is actually a very, very recent idea. It's a very privileged idea, it's an idea that comes about when people are only working eight hours a day. And to revert to an idea where commerce is essentially embedded in all our lives, where everything has a price, is actually a very ancient idea. And we are coming back to that perhaps with the ubiquity of social media. So I don't know if that is the correct way to look at it, but certainly when I was in the souk I was thinking commerce is everywhere in the air here, and it is when you go to Silicon Valley. These are the two social systems that are consistent. It's the one that shuts down commercial life at 5pm in the evening and turns it back on again at 9am in the morning that is actually the unusual one.

And coming up shortly we'll find out about what's been dubbed 'murketing', think murky and marketing combined, and we'll also talk with Doc Searls about his notion of the intention economy.

But before all of that, let's head to Boston and to Neela Sakaria, the executive vice president and managing director for the international research consultancy Latitude.

Latitude has been undertaking a study of smartphone owners and the way they like to shop. And their preliminary findings suggest mobile technology is making us into continuous shoppers.

Neela Sakaria: Mobile technology really allows people to think about their shopping in a very 360 or 24/7 kind of way. And the way I like think about it is that you don't have to be in a transactional mindset anymore before making a purchase, you can actually be in what I call an inspiration mindset. You can be out with friends, you can be watching TV, you can be doing other things, researching other topics or being immersed in other aspects of your life, and suddenly you have access to making a transaction in a way that you didn't before. So it's kind of reverse engineering or backing into a purchase in some cases, that we are seeing people really start to do.

And our research tells us that a lot of people are indicating doing more shopping than before, thanks to mobile devices, shopping while multitasking and doing other things, as I mentioned, and certainly being receptive to that idea of literally alerts from retailers and this idea that I want to express a need and I'd love it if retailers and brands come to me and kind of tell me when there are deals or sales or services in my area that makes sense to purchase right now.

Antony Funnell: In a sense then, mobile technology is keeping us in a buying mode, if you like, it's keeping us in the frame of mind that we have when we traditionally went into a shop to purchase something, it's just that that is happening then all the time.

Neela Sakaria: Exactly, I think it's allowing needs that are just under the surface to be surfaced and for somebody to say, oh...and I think for a lot of people that is not the first thing they think of yet, but I think we're getting there, and they go, oh, I could actually make a purchase right now, I don't have to wait three weeks before going to the store next time. You know, I saw somebody with that on, or I just drove by something that looks interesting, and I can go check out that service right now.

Antony Funnell: And in your survey you found that people actually did say that they were purchasing more because of mobile technology, because of the way in which they were using mobile technology.

Neela Sakaria: Yes, actually, just over a third of the people in our survey said that they are buying more when they are using mobile technology for shopping as compared to in a physical store. And when we asked people to think about it the other way, it was just about 16% or so who said that they were actually buying less with mobile than in a physical store. So that combined with the data we have on people saying they expect to do more purchasing online in the future certainly points to a larger trend of what we're talking about, that people have an appetite for it and that mobile technology is just enabling them to make those transactions now in ways that they couldn't before.

Antony Funnell: The use of mobile technology in the shopping context involves companies actively going out of their way to track your data, to find out what your preferences are, what your previous buying patterns were, and also to push things at you, to push products at you, to push deals at you. Interestingly, in your research you found that the majority that you surveyed didn't see that form of push marketing as a negative, as an intrusion necessarily into their lives.

Neela Sakaria: Yes, I think...and certainly in the end it comes down to execution, how is that message received, what was the content of it, and ultimately how relevant is it to me. But in general, based on the data we've seen, we see very high receptivity and high appetite for that kind of information because people feel like I'm being done a service, and as long as I'm getting something, as I said, that's really relevant to me and is done in a way that doesn't feel like it's spam, it feels like it's customised and it makes a lot of sense for me in this moment, then I will respond well to it.

And obviously the key there is that they are getting some value. And again, we've heard people respond well to really relevant deals or savings, or feeling like the alert that they were given is, again, personal enough to them in that it might be based on a previous purchase they made and here's a recommendation for three other things that could go along well with that purchase or be related to it. So I think it varies in terms of how exactly it is done, and certainly other factors as far as whether people really like it in that particular situation or moment. But in general we did see in our data that people feel positively towards the idea of that, and they'd like to see more of those kind of services from brands and retailers.

Video: The Future of Shopping: Technology continues to transform our lives. How we communicate, how we seek and receive information, how we are entertained. And now, even how we shop is dramatically changing. There are more ways than ever to instantly connect with retailers, information and people, giving us the intelligence to make...

Antony Funnell: The people that you surveyed for this report owned both smartphones and tablet computers, so we're talking about a group of people in the community who are already inclined toward a very positive view of technology and what it can do. Is it possible that the findings might be different for people who aren't so focused on technology?

Neela Sakaria: Yes, absolutely, it certainly is. And with this type of research we do intentionally focus on people who have smart phones, and in this case everybody had a smart phone, and about 60%, 65% of our participants had tablets. So certainly that is true, I mean, you would naturally expect...and again, we've seen from other research that people with lower inclinations towards technology, that may correlate with less of an interest win some of these things. But as far as our research goes, again, the reason why we focus on people who are adept and who are theoretically innovators or it least savvy adopters of technology is because we believe that they can help point to where the rest of us are headed.

Antony Funnell: Neela Sakaria, thank you very much for joining us.

Neela Sakaria: Great, thank you.

Antony Funnell: And just for the record, Latitude says its research was conducted free of any vested commercial interest. You'll find a link if you're curious on our website.

Test, test. Attention shoppers, attention shoppers, in a few seconds in aisle three, that's aisle three, we'll have Rob Walker giving us a brief description of the term 'murketing'.

Rob is the co-founder of the Significant Objects project, a contributing writer with the New York Times Magazine, and also the author of Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are. Once again shoppers, that's 'murketing' with Rob Walker.

Rob Walker: Murketing is a murky marketing, and this is a subject that I wrote a lot about earlier, mostly in a book called Buying In, basically exploring the blurring boundaries between what is marketing and what is culture, what is day to day life, which I think is a big goal of the marketing industry now, is to get away from the idea of the 30-second commercial that interrupts your life and instead find its way into being the primary subject or right next to the primary subject, so that you don't necessarily even know whether it's marketing or not. So murky marketing became, for me, murketing.

Antony Funnell: So it's blurring those distinctions or the traditional barriers I guess that we have between what isn't advertising and what is advertising or marketing. But why is it effective? If it is murky, if it is unclear, one would think that a marketer wants their brand to be identified with a very clear message, not with a message that is unclear.

Rob Walker: I think that they want it to be identified with a clear message, but I don't think that they want it to be identified with the idea that they are trying to send you that message. So what they are trying to go for, in a way, is insinuating themselves into situations and giving you the opportunity to come to some conclusion on your own. And the specific brand that I used when I first wrote about this was actually Red Bull. So Red Bull has this famous thing of, like, it contains taurine. So what is taurine? And it doesn't really sort of explain and there's no traditional claim, as there is in traditional advertising, to say 'taurine, it makes you do more push-ups' or whatever, it's not really clear what it is. So people just kind of came to the conclusion that somehow taurine must be an important and impressive ingredient that does something really good for you.

Every scientific study I have ever seen measuring the effects of taurine on your energy levels or anything like that is nothing, but nevertheless there is quite a strong belief that taurine is not only effective, it's almost dangerously effective, which gives it a kind of sex appeal and so on. But that entirely comes from perceptions projected onto this blank slate that Red Bull offered us. And that would be kind of the essence of the murketing idea.

Antony Funnell: And is this form of advertising, is it growing? Is it increasing, are more and more agencies using it?

Rob Walker: I would certainly say that the broader sense of blurring the line between what is marketing, what is entertainment, what is daily life, there's no question that that has just accelerated explosively since I first wrote about it however many years ago. And in some ways the entire online experience is based on some version of this, where the line between who your friends are and what you like is blurry. If you look at your Facebook status updates there will be things from your friends and things from entertainment shows that you've liked or whatever. You might see an ad saying that your friend likes a brand, maybe they like Red Bull, and that shows up.

There is kind of a blurriness which has done away with the old distinctions that used to exist between, okay, here is entertainment, here is life, and here is advertising. They are really trying to make that go away and just be a part of life, and sometimes be a catalyst almost for the creation of...the ultimate goal of something like Red Bull is to be a cultural object in the same way that a movie is a cultural object.

Philip Delves-Broughton: Peter Drucker, the great management guru, used to say that business is about two things, it's about innovation and selling. You need someone to come up with a product or service, and you need someone to go out there and sell it. Everything else in business, all the accountants, strategists, lawyers, are parasites on those two central activities. So the semantic web, whatever you want to call it, this huge volume of information that is now being churned through by algorithms, by search engines, by companies that specifically look for data and pricing and product specifications, and even try to match up customers and buyers, these vast online marketplaces, of course they are transforming things.

And there's a very interesting school of selling which is saying the great salesman these days are not basically trying to con or delude a customer into buying something they don't really need, but are essentially becoming a partner to help the customer sift through this vast abundance of information and make sense of it and make the right buying decisions. And I think that's true, to an extent. But what is also changing of course is that as consumers, you think of how you buy a coffee maker, you used to just go to the department store and buy a coffee maker. Now there's just this vast amount of information. You can spend your entire life looking at consumer reports on coffee makers. So the sale has changed.

But I don't think the human has yet been eliminated from this, whether you want to call it the ghost in the machine, whatever it is. As I said, all this information is out there, it's available to everybody, but I'm sure you know and your listeners know, when you go into a store and have an experience the great salesperson, it makes the act of commerce so much more enjoyable, whether you're buying a suit or buying a house, they appear to give you what you want at a price you're happy with. It kind of enhances your day, and it is not evil commerce or all these other things, it's simply two people exchanging goods and services in a way we have done for all eternity and all of history, and we will continue to do. And when it is done well it is, I think, elevating and brightens our day.

Now, our final guest today is Doc Searls, an alumnus fellow at Harvard University. Searls has also written extensively about our modern relationship with selling, and his book on the subject is called The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge.

Doc Searls' fascination is with trying to find a way to redress the power imbalance between customers and companies in favour of the buyer.

Doc Searls: I think that we kind of went sideways as civilisation when industry won the Industrial Revolution, because then we invented mass manufacture and mass marketing, and it was easier for business to treat customers as populations than as individual human beings. Before that we were individual human beings.

What began to happen with the internet and before that with personal computers is that the power that once belonged to corporations has been not so much shifted to individuals but individuals have had more of it than they ever had before. And so there has been this growth of personal power. But most of the effort on the internet, on the commercial internet, since 1995 has been toward equipping the sell side, the vendors, rather than individuals. We've given more power to individuals within corporate silos.

You know, you can go to...I don't know what you have in Australia, but you have something called Travelocity here and some other companies that let you search across multiple hotels and things like that, and Amazon and so forth, you can get all kinds of products you never could before, but you are still doing it inside these corporate silos, they are still treating you to some degree not as individual human beings but as consumers that don't really produce, that don't really have full autonomy, that don't really have power other than what they give you.

And our ability to relate to these companies is really very limited by their capacities. If we want to change our address once for everybody we deal with, we can't do that yet. And so that's why, starting about six years ago, a bunch of different companies and development projects, some open source, started working in what we call vendor relationship management, where we have the capabilities to not only assert our own independence but have better ways of engaging with the corporations of the world, especially the sellers of the world, where we can set our own terms, where we can advertise what we're looking for, but without being tracked, without being followed everywhere, without being told, 'Here's how you are going to communicate,' where we really have independence from the corporations and the sellers that want to control us.

Antony Funnell: And that notion of vendor relationship management, or VRM as it's also called, involves trying to develop systems that will allow people to have better direct control over their online data, the same online data that is currently harvested by companies in order to pitch products to you.

Doc Searls: Right now when we go on the web, every place we go we need a different log-in, we had a different password. Every one of them provides its own ways of dealing with us. It would be nice if we had a single way that we could deal with all of them, where we could be in charge of our data and we could control the way that data is passed out to the companies that want to have it or to use it.

And so they are a number right now of companies that are developing tools for that. There are ones that call these a data locker or a data vault or a data cloud. There is actually competition among these. There is a company called Privowny, there's another one called Singly and Personal and Qiy, that's in the Netherlands, there's Mydex and The Customer's Voice, they're both in the UK, there's one called TrustFabric in South Africa. But it's very early-stage stuff at this point and not all of those are going to succeed.

And it is important to understand that this is really still very early work, but progress doesn't happen evenly, and it's going to dawn on companies when they start getting better information from customers voluntarily than they are actually kind of stealing from customers right now in the way the advertising system works online, where they deposit cookies in your browser and then follow you around and then your data gets scraped up and it gets sent to some mill where the quants, as they call them, the mathematicians all develop algorithms from looking at it, and then they are going to guess better at what you might want.

And that is a fiction right now, that…most of the big data talk that's going on lately that IBM is pushing and Oracle and a bunch of other companies, is based on a fallacious notion that companies can know what you want better than you do and can make you want stuff better than you can do on your own, and also this really silly notion that we're buying something all the time. We're not. You know, a lot of the time we're just looking around and trying to find stuff out or being curious or talking to each other.

Antony Funnell: So the vendor relationship management systems that you're talking about in a sense allow people to control the data that they put online, which comes back to the name of your book, doesn't it, The Intention Economy. So people control their own data more and they signal their intentions to companies, rather than companies scanning their data and deciding when they think they should market to you.

Doc Searls: Exactly. And what happens is something that is more like dialogue than monologue. Right now we have the sell side, marketers especially, trying to endlessly improve monologue. They'll talk about conversation but they don't really mean that when they are talking about big data. On the advertising side they're not talking about conversation. They really think that they can have perfect knowledge of you and that they really don't need to talk to you because why would they need to talk, they know everything because they Hoover up all this data of yours. It's a mistake.

Once we have something that's a lot more like dialogue and both sides can exchange information that is truly useful to each other and under permissions that are well understood, then we are going to have a much more efficient and productive economy growing out of that.

For example, let's say once we have the means by which we can assert our preferences for terms of service. If we have the ability to say here are my preferences, not only don't track me but give my data back to me when you are done and give it to me in this form, and I'm a reliable person and a good potential customer, you can find my credit history here if we have a relationship. If we have a relationship it will be on these terms and you can find them over here. That's the kind of thing that could be fully automated, and people hardly even know it's there, they could set in a bunch of defaults to begin with and companies are going to be paying attention to it, like they are going to be paying attention to Do Not Track and to ad blocking.

I think that downstream there is going to be something that goes past browsing, I think that the current model of the web that we have that is informed by browsers is pretty old. Somebody is going to invent something that is a better way to navigate through the web and work on the internet that is not the browser model. I think it's just kind of old at this point. And we are thinking inside that box and somebody is going to come along with a larger or better or more efficient way to do that. It's kind of like trying to imagine a car when all you've got is a railroad.

So again, that's another way...things are early. I think the vendor relationship management...it's kind of like it was conceived as the customer side counterpart of customer relationship management, which most of us don't see, but we see it in call centres, we see it in promotional literature we get, but it's a big complicated thing that happens inside of companies, but we only see a part of it.

I think in a similar way it will be in like a body function for us as customers in the connected world where we have control that we just haven't experienced before. Our data is over here, our preferences are over there, our policies are these. So VRM is basically going to be kind of a feature in many different ways that will interoperate in the marketplace.

Guests

Philip Delves-Broughton

Journalist and author of 'The Art of The Sale'.

Doc Searls

Author of the Intention Economy and Alumnus Fellow with Harvard's Berkman Centre for Internet and Society.

Neela Sakaria

Executive Vice President and Managing Director Latitude Research.

Rob Walker

Co-founder of The Significant Objects project, contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine and author of 'Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy And Who We Are'.